This presentation is brought you
by Arizona State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability and a generous investment
by Julie Ann Wrigley. Wrigley Lecture Series,
world renowned thinkers and problem solvers engage
the community in dialogues to address sustainability
challenges. My name is Chris Boone. I'm the dean of the
School of Sustainability, which is part of the Julie
Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. And I'm very proud
to say that we are one of the sponsors of
tonight's special presentation by Dr. Shiva. The Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability provides support to bring in
the world's leading thinkers and practitioners
in sustainability. And of course, Dr.
Shiva's certainly one among those ranks. This is the second of the
Wrigley series of this year. One of the things that
we do in the Institute is to not only think about
human environmental issues, but also to think
about solutions. And the Julie Ann
Wrigley series, I think, exemplifies that spirit and
exemplifies those principles. So as I mentioned, this
is a cosponsored event. In addition to the
Wrigley Institute, we also have the Institute
of Humanities Research and the School of
Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
as cosponsors. It's my honor now to introduce
to you Dr. Sally Kitch, who is a regents professor, one
of the highest honors awarded at ASU to faculty. She's also the founding
director of the Institute of Humanities Research
and I'm particularly proud to say that she's a
distinguished sustainability scientist. Sally. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Chris. I'm here to tell you a little
bit about the Institute of Humanities Research
and also to tell you about the project
that is actually responsible for thinking about
bringing Vandana Shiva here to ASU. We are part of an
international project that is sponsored by the
Mellon Foundation through the Consortium for
Humanity Centers and Institutes to look at a global
perspective on humanities for the environment. And sometimes people think,
what do the humanities have to do with the environment? But as I think you'll
hear a little bit tonight, it has everything to do
with the environment. And that, in fact,
environmental issues are not in the first instance
technological problems, but they're issues that involve
human cultures and capacities. And we're here in our project
to study and represent these possibilities. So also thanks not only
to the Wrigley Institute but also to President Crow's
Presidential Initiative Funds and Shippers, we are
able to bring Dr. Shiva tonight so she can speak to us about
some of these crucial and deep issues involving
the environment. I would now like to
introduce the person who's going to introduce Dr. Shiva. Because you never just
get one person up here. And that is Doctor
Joni Adamson, who is a professor of English
and Environmental Humanities here at ASU, and also
a senior sustainability scholar in the
Wrigley Institute. Joni. [APPLAUSE] I would like to warmly
welcome you to this lecture. Today we meet on the lands of
the Akimel O'odham and Pima nations. And I tell you this because
the focus of my own work is on global indigenous and
oral and written literatures. I first came to know the work
of Dr. Vandana Shiva when I had to answer the question
of why so many indigenous novelists and writers
around the world were writing about
food sovereignty, seed saving, and soil health. This brought me to
Dr. Shiva's books and her prodigious writings
answered my questions about why a prominent Laguna
Pueblo writer such as Leslie Marmon Silko would write a novel
that has as its main character a small O'odham girl
who collects seeds and who freely shares
them around the world. This novel titled Gardens in the
Dunes focuses on all the topics that we will be discussing
tonight, including seeds, seed saving, and famine foods. And the novel illustrates
one of the ways in which the
humanities and the arts are contributing
significantly to conversations around the future of foods. Dr. Shiva is a world renowned
environmental thinker, a seed and food sovereignty activist,
a physicist, feminist, philosopher of science, a
writer, and a science policy advocate. In the 1970s, during that
historic Chipko or Hug The Tree movement in the central
Himalayan region, she dramatically shifted
her career direction after learning that the
women protecting forests against logging-- excuse
me, after learning that the women protecting
forests against logging were trying to convey the idea
that to the world, forests for timber, revenue,
and profits, but the real products
of the forests were soil, water, and pure air. She went on to focus her
work on protecting access to clean water and
preserving the diversity and integrity of
native organisms. In 1993, she was a recipient
of the Right Livelihood Award, commonly known as
the alternative Nobel Prize. She's also the co-founder of
Navdanya, an organization that works with local communities
and groups in India. She is the writer of many
books, including Staying Alive, Biopiracy, Monocultures of
the Mind, and Water Wars, and one that is very important
to this seminar, Soil Not Oil, as well as over 300
papers in leading scientific and
technical journals. Her recent work in
Soil Not Oil, she has argued that
we need to quote, "Change our mind before
we can change our world. This cultural transition
is at the heart of making energy transitions
to an age beyond oil." Unquote. Energy transitions is a
research and cultural issue that we here at ASU are
deeply involved in working on and it is an area of concern
that is bringing humanists together with their colleagues
across the disciplines. Dr. Shiva's visit to ASU is part
of a humanities workshop titled Forms of Collaborative
Knowledge and Collective Action, The Future of Food, in
which we will dive into issues and discussions about
how we can build interactional competencies
to work together. There is no one more
qualified to help us think about these topics. She has inspired change
and empowered others through her optimism,
her strength, and her unwavering
determination to demonstrate the ways in which
scientific knowledge, ecological knowledge,
and collective action can lead to positive
changes in the world. It is my great honor
and my deep pleasure to welcome Dr. Vandana
Shiva to the podium. Her lecture is titled, "The
Future of Food, Dictatorship or Democracy." [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much
to the collaboration between the Institute
of Sustainability, the Institute for
Humanities Research, the School of Historical,
Philosophical, and Religious Studies. And isn't that an
amazing collaboration? I think it's the first time
such a diversity of institutes and disciplines have invited me. And it already shows
that ASU is truly looking at the challenges
of sustainability and non sustainability in
a very fresh way. I never thought
I'd spend so much of my life looking at food. I was among those
crazy scientists who thought food is a luxury. You eat it when
you have to eat it. And I realize increasingly
that food is the web of life. Because the web of
life is interactions between different
organisms, where one is the food of the other. And the soil food web it's
such an amazing correction to that extremely
false idea that life is a pyramid with man on top. The organisms in the soil
are one step beyond us. We are their food. That should bring us
a little humility. [LAUGHTER] And how we produce
and consume food is probably the most
significant impact, both on the planet and society. In recent years, there was an
indifference to these issues. I woke up to it in
1984, when violence erupted in the state
of Punjab, which is the land of five rivers,
prosperous, hardworking farmers. The Green Revolution was
first implemented in Punjab. It was even given a Nobel
Peace Prize with the thesis that changing the seeds and
adapting them to chemicals is going to create so
much prosperity that there will be peace. And the color green did not
come from the philosophy green. There was no philosophy
green in '60s. The Green Movement
grew much later as a sustainability movement. Green was just a color
different from red. And red is what you didn't
want/ and the idea was, you engineer the seeds,
you engineer society, and there'll be
peace ever after. But there wasn't
peace in Punjab. That same year, in
the city of Bhopal, a pesticide plant owned
by Union Carbide leaked. And I rushed in
with bucket fulls of Neem saplings, beautiful
tree whose scientific name is azadirachta
indica, which has been used for centuries
in India for pest control. And I drew a poster. No more Bhopal,
let's plant a Neem. But by the end of that
year, I was asking myself, why is the model of
agriculture that is dominant causing so much violence? And I was working,
at that point, on a major program
for the United Nations University on conflicts
over natural resources. And either I think
the conflicts that are deeper than the ones
that are being reported on. And will you let me investigate? They did. I wrote a book called
The Violence of the Green Revolution as a result. And while doing the
research for the book, half the time the
field trips had to be canceled because the
train had been blown up or the bus had been
blown up with a bomb. But I persisted and
finally did the research. And I remember in particular a
declaration of the Sharbat Khalsa, which is the big
body of the Sikhs, saying when can't choose what
you grow, when you can't decide the methods of production,
when you don't determine the price of what you
produced, when your own river's water can't be released
through your decision. Because the Bhakra dam
was controlled by Delhi. Then we are living
under slavery. And the reason they came out
with this was because the Green Revolution, by the '80s, was
going into a negative economy. Farmers were getting into debt. There were more pests. There was more pesticide use. The nitrogen
fertilizer was having to be used more and more, with
no gain and yield right now. The yields are going
down that much. The soils were dying, the
water was disappearing, the farmers were angry. And they took to the gun. There were protests. The protests
weren't listened to. Something very
similar is actually happening right now in Syria. But so rapidly our minds
have become so fragmented and we forget so fast. Now, I remember reading in
newspapers just a few years ago how there was a major
drought in Syria. And just as the Indian peasants
had revolted in the '80s, instead of offering a solution
through food democracy, through the rights of farmers to
have seed sovereignty and food sovereignty, instead of creating
a more fair system of pricing of food, the military was sent
to the Golden Temple, which is the sacred shrine
of the Sikhs in Amritsar. The Sikhs felt outraged. They had assassinated Indira
Gandhi by the end of the year. And in response, the
congress killed 3,006 in a terrible program. And the justice on that
issue hasn't yet been done. But in Syria, as the drought
continued to intensify, 800,000 Syrians,
farmers and herdsmen in the area around the
town of [INAUDIBLE], were losing their livelihoods. 75% of the crop had finished. 85% of the herds were dead. And they came into
the city protesting. They were rested, they
were thrown into jail, and that is what created
the anti Assad movement. Assad himself had locked into
the globalization paradigm of new liberalism
where agriculture has to be either
destroyed or ignored. And global trade is
what gets priority. With the drought, the farmers
started to mine more water where they could. And the [INAUDIBLE] figures
are there, both for Punjab as well as for Syria, which is
in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. 144 cubic meters were being lost
because of excessive drilling. In Punjab, the water level
is falling by a foot a year. This is a land
where, in my days, younger days, wherever you
went in Indo-Gangetic Plain, you would see
Persian wheels, which would be getting
water at 10 feet. More than 26 cubic miles of
water disappeared in Punjab. Why is so much water
being wasted and misused? Because whether it's
in Syria or in India, crops that use less water
have been displaced. Whether it is drought resistant
rices or barley or wheat or the millets which I call
the foods of the future. The millets are the
most nutritious crops. You think they just bird food. No, they are
authentic human food. We did a calculation
that if we grew millet, we would have 400
times more food using the same amount
of water in India. The Green Revolution, which
is based on chemicals, is water intensive. Not for the plants,
but for the chemicals. Uses 10 times more water. Globally, between 75%
to 95% of the water in different countries is going
into an intensive agriculture which is not bringing us
any gains in food security. In fact, it's
undermining food security by destroying
water availability. Because the limiting factor
for the production of food is not limits of land. We've got so much land. But the land is not
always able to grow food because of limits on water. And in desert cultures, the
indigenous people of this land or in Rajasthan or the
semi-arid tracts of the Deccan, farmers evolve the
most amazing ways of conserving water
and using less. Now of course there's a lot of
fashion about crop per drop. But it's not yet at
the systems level where you have ecosystems
conserving more water and using less. I have seen, of course, on
the flights to this country sometimes napkins served that
say, "We put more water back than we take." Now that is
arithmetically impossible. But Coca Cola and Pepsi
Cola try and convince us that they are creators of water. So water wise, these systems
were hugely non sustainable. And because we have
developed very reductionist mechanistic ways of
thinking about the world since the Industrial
Revolution, and these have been defined as the only
way you can approach science. But we have now the
advantage of the birth of ecological sciences all over. At no point was a response made
in terms of food democracy. Not in Syria, not in India. Not in Sudan, not in Nigeria. Every conflict we see
around the world today that is defined as a
religious conflict has at its roots resource use. And how we grow food is the
single biggest determinant of resource use. Most people in the world farm. Because we use the figures
up how much of humanity lives in cities, we forget
that in most of Africa, 90% to 95% people are
involved in agriculture, most of them women. So narrowing it down into a
conflict based on religion, we then create an amazing
narrative of enemies out there. I wish President Obama was
not sending drones and fighter jets to drop bombs, but was
allowing Syria and Iraq, which gave agriculture to the world,
to be able to rejuvenate their biodiversity, to
be able to rejuvenate their agriculture. I work very closely with
Professor [INAUDIBLE], who was, for most of his
life, in Aleppo, where there is an International Center
of Arid Zone agriculture research [INAUDIBLE]. Of course, Aleppo
has been bombed. But Dr. [INAUDIBLE]
works with us on how participatory
breeding with farmers is our only security today. He works with us on
evolutionary breeding that in times of
climate change you've got to allow the plants
to evolve to adapt. Put the seeds out in
that seed bank in Norway. They call it the
doomsday seed bank. I don't think we can ever
talk about the seed in terms of dooms days. The seed is what carries
hope and the future. And it is evolving. When it goes through
a hot period, it evolves to deal with it. When it goes through a
flat, it evolves with it. And when a seed has to be in
areas where you have cyclones or salt water in the
backwaters, farmers have evolved salt tolerant
varieties in [INAUDIBLE] seed banks. We just saved every
seed we could. We've created 120
community seed banks. Because we were not
making a judgment about nature and our ancestors. We knew they had intelligence. And then when the super
cyclone hit Orissa in 1999, we were able to distribute salt
tolerant seeds from our seed banks. And Orissa jumped
back in agriculture. In 2004 when the
tsunami hit, the farmers were members of Navdanya and
were growing salt tolerant seeds. Gifted two truckloads
to Tamil Nadu. Now, I've gone to Tamil Nadu
when the tsunami happened, and agriculture department
said we can't do agriculture for five years. And we don't know what
to do with our farmers. I said, you can do
agriculture right now. We'll bring you the seeds. And the seeds
didn't just survive. They did so well that they've
been getting distributed. They've traveled all
the way to Indonesia. A farmer came up to me on
my recent trip in Indonesia to say, I'm bring the
salt tolerant seeds we received from Navdanya. So seeds are the hope. These are seeds of hope. This diversity is our real
insurance for the future. Whether it is to deal
with climate change or it is to create
democracy or it is to deal with the pests
and insects and diseases that are typical of
the monoculture model. And yet the monoculture paradigm
destroys that diversity. In 1995, the food and
agricultural organization did a conference on
plant genetic resources, to make an assessment
of how much have we lost and why have we lost it. And every country
was asked to do this assessment of
biodiversity in agriculture. '95 they found 75% of the
diversity in agriculture had disappeared because of
industrial monocultures. And in '95,
globalization was just being born through
the free trade rules of what became the
World Trade Organization. Because of my work on
the Green Revolution, I'd started to get invited
to agriculture meetings. And I'm a perennial learner. Any place I find I can learn
something new, I'll be there. Because I don't
think one ever learns enough with a degree or
a university or a PhD. I think more PhDs should go
back to learn all over again, something they've
never did a PhD on. [LAUGHTER] So I get invited to
this conference in 1987 on biotechnology. 1987 there were no GMO crops. It was a small meeting
organized jointly with the United Nations and the
Dag Hammarskjold Foundation. Dag Hammarskjol was the first
Director General of the UN. And it was called Laws Of Life. What are the implications
of the new biotechnology? It was pre commercialization. And the industry
was very honest, which was the industry
that was starting to think of biotechnology,
the old chemical industry. Who was this old
chemical industry that brought us
the agrochemicals? The old war chemical industry. I'm reading my book
for my trip this time. It's not a very pleasant book. It's called Hell's Cartel. And it's about the
chemical industry that made chemicals for
the war, for killing people in concentration camps. There was then
tried in Nuremberg. They moved into
agriculture after the war, not wanting to give up their
habit of selling chemicals for profits. But they did a
very, very good job of making it look like
without their chemicals we could not grow food. So unless you could kill
every insect you saw, we would starve as human beings. Every insect was in
competition with us. Textbooks on pest control
say the war against pests. We have to keep
escalating it because they are getting smarter. Pesticides have
created more pests. 1,200% is what the figure
was a few years ago. Now, at this meeting,
industry said very clearly the reason we've got to
do genetic engineering is it's the only way we
can continue to grow. Only through genetic engineering
can we claim patents on seeds. By adding a new
gene, we can now say we have created another life
form and claim a patent. And they also said it
wasn't good enough. The sampling is the rich world
is a very small market when it comes to food. Europe and the USA
are small compared to the billions in our
parts of the world. And everyone must eat. And most farmers
are in the south. Every fourth farmer
is an Indian peasant. So it's not good
enough to have laws of patenting of seed
for Europe and America. We've got to have it
globally and therefore we need an intellectual
property rights agreement. In what became the GATT,
the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff, is
what became the World Trade Organization. In 1995, a Monsanto
representative in a speech in
Washington, DC said, "We've achieved something
absolutely unprecedented. We wrote an agreement,
gave it to our government, which then had it
moved through the GATT. We also went directly
to the GATT secretariat and moved the treaty. And we were the patient,
diagnostician, physician, all in one." And what was the problem? What was the disease? The disease was farmers
are saving seed. Now, a patent is a
right of an inventor to exclude anyone else from
making, using, selling, distributing what is invented. The problem is when it comes to
seed, seed is not an invention. Seed evolves. Farmers co-evolve with the
seed to breed varieties. Seed is evolution. And I'm so glad Pope Francis
has said evolution happens. [LAUGHTER] Evolution is real. Just gave a speech
the other day. So the invention of seed
being built into law for me was so outrageous. Because I had been
working to defend the integrity of species, the
intrinsic value of every life form of this planet. And to suddenly be told the
life forms are inventions was a very, very deep violation. But I kept thinking,
these companies are talking about five of
them controlling the seed supply in the future. That's what they said. They said we are too small,
so we must become bigger. And right now you see Monsanto
is controlling so many seed companies. That meeting there was
Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz. They merged to become the
pharmaceutical firm Novartis and then they joined
with Astra and Zeneca to become Syngenta, the second
biggest corporation that controls seed, especially
genetically modified seeds. So after I'd heard
the corporations talk about their future, I said
I'm going to save seeds. And I took inspiration from
Gandhi's spinning wheel. Realizing that
the British empire ran on control over the textile
industry and the raw material for the textile industry. And the living seed
was being reduced to raw material for the
biotechnology industry. Because you don't
invent the seed, you take it from somebody. Usually you just steal it. And so much of my life
has gone in dealing with what I call biopiracy. Now seed exchange
has always happened. Exchange is not piracy. But you come to me
and you take the seed and then you patent it and
say I created it and now you pay me royalty,
that's bio piracy. So the four cases we
have fought and won. The first was Neem,
that wonderful tree I took to Bhopal. 10 years later I
find it's patented. And world's first
biopesticide from Neem. So we started a campaign and
I took 100,000 signatures to the European Patent
Office as well as to the US Patent Office. Now, the US Patent
Office wrote and said, "What's your
commercial interest?" We said we don't have
a commercial interest. We have a public interest. We have an ecological interest. Sorry, we only entertain
commercial competition between two people
claiming a patent. But the European law has a
clause on public interest, so they admitted it. For 11 years we fought
that case and we won. And the patent was held
jointly by a company called WR Grace and the US
Department of Agriculture. I remember when we
first filed a case. The lawyers, they
were common lawyers, and they're pointing to me in
the courtroom of the European Patent Office and saying,
"She can't be here because she's not a European." So I just smiled and
said, "No, are you?" Because they were Americans. [LAUGHTER] But of course there's
this thing of how can a brown woman in a
sari come and challenge us? But when it's illusions of that
scale that cause so much harm to the democracy of life on this
planet and our food democracy, then I will challenge. There was another case where
a Texas company claimed to have invented our
beautiful basmati, for which my valley, Doon
Valley, is famous. And we had to do
campaigns on that. I had to fight cases. And eventually they had to
drop most of their claims. We even did an action
where I came to Texas and worked with church
groups to send postcards. So it's US Patent and Trademark
Office, which becomes USBTO. And the postcard just said, if
you don't revoke this patent, we will have to call you the
US Piracy and Theft Office. And they dropped the patents. And then everyone's
getting gluten allergies because wheat has
been bred in a way that it's expressing
too much gluten. We in India have wheats that
don't express the gluten. Our ancient wheats don't
lead to gluten intolerance. So when [INAUDIBLE]
realizes a huge market. Some figures I've read
is every third American has problems with the wheat now. So there's a market. They pick up an
Indian wheat variety and say we've invented
all its properties and now we're going to
control and monopolize all products made from,
all the seed, the grain, and all products
made from wheat. In this particular
case, by the time I went to file the patent in
the European Patent Office and the head of
the patent office is coming out in the snow, I'm
trudging through and saying, I'm so happy to see
you again, Dr. Shiva. I said, you should be ashamed
to see me again, because it just means you keep issuing
bio piracy patents, which is illegitimate and illegal
and violates the law. Because piracy is theft. It's not an invention. Sadly, this idea of
a totally constructed intellectual property
in seed and life is being pushed very, very hard. And it is having
very high costs. I don't know how
many of you have because of patents on
seed, on GMO seeds. American farmers are spending
$10 billion extra for royalty. Because that's
the main intention of genetically engineered
seed, to collect a royalty. In India, I won't give
you the long story of what happened
to India's cotton, but before globalization, before
Monsanto entered the country, if it was a farmer's
own seed, it was 0 cost. If it had been bought
from a public institution or a local company,
it was five rupees or 10 rupees a kilogram of seed. Monsanto enters with 450
gram packages 1,600 rupees. It's more than 3,600
for a kilogram. And as a Monsanto
representative said to a parliamentary committee
that was investigating, the crisis related to GMOs. They said, yeah, half of
it is royalty collection. But can you imagine? Here's the seed that's
growing and evolving. Here are farmers who have
worked to evolve that seed. They're doing the hard
work in the field. And the royalties
come to Monsanto. There've been so
many investigations on the banking system. There've been so
many investigations on Ponzi schemes of all kinds. One thing that hasn't
being investigated, and I hope the amazing
institutions that are hosting this lecture will get into
this, intellectual property rights on seed patents, on
seed are a Ponzi scheme. [APPLAUSE] Of course, this Ponzi scheme is
upheld with claims of miracles from GMOs, the first claim
being that they produce more food and the
world will go hungry and there'll be 10 billion
people on the planet and without GMOs
you won't have food. Because of GMOs we
don't have food. Only 10% of the
GMO corn and soya which accounts for the
largest expansion of acreage in the world in
the recent years. Only 10% goes for food. The UN data has clarified
that 70% of the food we eat comes from small farms. And I would assume that if we
add the gardens, urban gardens, organic farms, we would have
figures that would cross 80%. So in fact the industrial
system is a minority system when it comes to food security. But it is the major
system that is causing both the ecological
crisis as well as the crisis of democracy. What is a dictatorship? A dictatorship basically is
control of an absolute kind. And look at what's happening
to our food system. See the first link
in the food system is being controlled like
we've never seen before. It was not controlled before. It was shared. We had public
universities breeding seed and they'd share the seed. Farmers shared seed
amongst each other. I have learned so much from
the peasant cultures of India and the cultures of seed
saving and seed sharing. But what we have
witnessed so far is just the beginning
of this new system. We've had industrial
agriculture. We've had the Green Revolution. But this thing called the
Second Green Revolution, precision agriculture,
one agriculture for the entire world, that's
what they're talking about. That future vision
is a disaster. So can GMOs produce more food? They can't. The technology is
not for breeding. The technology is for
shooting a gene that doesn't belong to the plant. The yield comes from
the original plant. You don't really
know what's happening when you shoot a gene. It's not a precise technology. It's a highly inaccurate
and imprecise technology. But it brings new
risks, which is why we have international
law on bio safety. In the US, you
don't have such laws because President Bush
came back and implemented a principle which is
totally unscientific, a principle of
substantial equivalents. If I have a corn that
has evolved as a corn and crossed with
other corns, and I have a corn with
a BT toxin in it that has taken a gene
from a soil organism and is now expressing
toxins in this corn, this BT corn is not the
same as the ordinary corn. We make a difference between
chemically farmed and organic crops. And here we are tampering with
the very genome of the crop and saying it's the same. I've called this
ontological schizophrenia because when it comes to owning
the seed through patents, you say never existed before. I'm the creator. I'm the inventor. I am the one who's brought
something novel in the world. So give me a patent. Then say, OK, this thing you
brought into the world that's so novel, can we
please look at it and see what impact it
has on the environment, on the pollinators,
on the soil organisms? Can we please look at what
it does to our health? Can we please look at what does
it do to farmers economics? We are told no, just
like nature made it. We don't have to look. We don't have to see. We don't have to find. And by not doing anything,
we declare safety. And then we go around
bullying the world which does experiments on safety
to say it's unscientific. Now Europe has safety
laws and they do tests. The first was a test done
by the-- The UK government commissioned the top lectin
expert of his time, Dr. [INAUDIBLE], to do
tests on GMO crops, because the movements
were very strong. And he was actually pro GMO. He didn't expect to
find anything different. But he found that the rats he
was testing in the three month study, their brain had shrunk,
the pancreas had expanded, their intestinal
walls were damaged, and their immunity
system was compromised. So he went to his director
and said, this is serious. Three months of feeding? What will happen
to lifelong eating? Come on, humans, we
must warn the public. So they did a press conference. It went all over the world. Next day there was a call
from the United States to Tony Blair. Shut this man, shut this lab. Put a gag order. Putting a gag order on
scientists who are telling us what's really going on
at the level of science means not just sowing the
seeds of dictatorship, but preparing us for
ignorance of what's happening. The next victim was [INAUDIBLE]
at Berkeley, who did studies on the contamination
of the corn in Mexico. His paper was
published in Nature, and suddenly there
were letters to Nature saying withdraw this paper. Nature had never
experienced this before, so they withdrew the paper. Turns out, there's a system
called viral marketing, and it was a British
journalist who tracked it, where on one computer I can cook
up 1,000 names of scientists who don't exist, bombard the
journal, and have them panic. There were no scientists
complaining to Nature. It was viral marketing. The more recent case is that
of Seralini, Eric Seralini, who used to be a regulator at
[INAUDIBLE] for bio safety. And he used to see the dossiers
that the companies were bringing. And he says, this is so sloppy. There's no research here. They're just declaring safety. And he went back to France
where he had been a scientist and opened a lab to
look at bio safety. He's the first person
who did a two year study on genetically
engineered corn. It hasn't been done before. Most trials are for
three month feeding. He did a two year feeding study. And because he knew what
happens, he kept it very quiet, got it published in the
Journal of Chemical and Food Toxicology. It was published. Then this viral
marketing started. They said, withdraw the paper. They said the rats were too few. He said, my rats were more
than the Monsanto number. Wrong species. Same species. This is the one that's used all
over the world for lab trials. Anyway, they started putting
out saying, unscientific. And Dr. Seralini's
Wikipedia doesn't talk to Dr. Seralini's research,
it talks about Seralini affair, like he's some shady
scientist cooking up his data. And when they couldn't get away
getting his paper withdrawn because the journal just said,
sorry, this is peer reviewed, it's gone through all
the tests, and we are not going to withdraw it, they
just changed the editor. A Monsanto man was planted
and he withdrew the study. Seralini published it
in another journal, but you can see that the
issue of food dictatorship begins with the
seed, goes into food, goes into our knowledge systems,
goes into how our decisions are made, because governments
are being hijacked. I feel very sorry to
see the White House, whether it was under
Bush or under Obama, only doing what Monsanto
asks them to do. I won't go into details
of the new trade treaties, but I will talk a little about
the fact that in spite of GMOs not producing more
food, in spite of GMOs not reducing chemical use. That was the promise, that
we won't have to spray. There'll be no chemical uses. Everything will be done. I'll just run through. In India, BT cotton
is not working to control the bull worm,
but has created new pests. Aphids, [INAUDIBLE]. But new epidemics,
more pesticide use. In China, 12 fold more use
pesticides in the BT crops. In the US, herbicide
use increased 15%. And right now in Argentina,
overall glyphosate use has tripled because
of Roundup Ready soya. And then if you
look at the impacts, you see the Argentinian studies
on the birth defects, children being born without
brains, children being born with no anus. And these are pediatricians
of the government doing these studies. Chemical use hasn't gone down. Production hasn't increased. Farmers incomes haven't
increased, because you now have the burden of
additional chemicals as well as the royalty
payment for seed, seed which should be a commons, seed which
should be in every farmer's hands. Seed sovereignty
is the very basis of food sovereignty, which is
the basis of food democracy. The alternatives are
doing so much better. Every UN study has shown that
agroecology produces more food. There's a UNEP study called
Preventing Future Famines, Defending the Ecological
Foundations of Agriculture. A UNCTAD study called The Wake
Up Call To Governments saying don't go down this
non sustainable path. FAO study showing that even in
Africa agroecological systems are producing much more food. And our own studies,
the Health Breaker, which shows that man measured
in terms of nutrition, biodiverse ecological
systems can feed not just the 10 billion
they would like us to be scared about,
but 14 billion. But we shouldn't
become 14 billion. We are too many already. And I won't go into
too much detail about how, an agriculture that
removes people from the land has a big role in
population growth. Because as long as people
are secure in their land, they know how large
the family should be. So when they're displaced, that
they have to sell their labor power, they've got
to have a child who grows up enough, who
survives until they are old. All of that combination
of insecurity, which on the one hand is
creating conflicts, which is being labeled as
religious conflict. And on the other
hand, is triggering the need for larger numbers
in the context of insecurity. The roots are in removing
people from agriculture. We've also done a new report
that agriculture minister just released. It's called Wealth Breaker. I've done a PhD in the
foundations of quantum theory, very tricky combination
of non separability and unpredictability
and it's tough to get your head around it. And I would very often
not solve a problem and then I'd go to
sleep and in the morning I'd start writing my
chapter in my PhD. But the globalized industrial
system is like 10 PhDs. Here you have high cost
seed with a patent royalty, and it ends up as cheap food. In fact, the other
day I had the debate where the biotech
industry was saying, only we can produce
food that's cheap. I said no, you produce
seed that's costly. The subsidies produce
food that becomes cheap. [APPLAUSE] 400 billion is the
global subsidy. $1 billion a day. In the US, the
industrial system would collapse if that tax
money was diverted from subsidizing toxic food
that's destroying the planet and destroying our health to
being shifted to growing food that protects the planet
and protects our health and generates employment
in the process. Let me revisit the
destruction on the planet. 75% of planetary damage,
water, soil, biodiversity. 40% of the greenhouse
gases come from the globalized
industrial system. We are talking about the
biggest impact on the planet. And yet ecological farming
and local food system can be the place where we do
the opposite, we rejuvenate bio diversity, we save seeds. We build up organic fertility
of the soil, we conserve water. And we mitigate and
adapt climate change. We literally have capacity
through organic farming to take out much more
of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than
is being put into it. But of course, we get rid
of nitrogen oxides that come from nitrogen fertilizers. We get rid of methane
that comes on the one side from factory farming
and on the other side from wasting 50% of the food. That's the figure
for this country. 50% food is wasted. It's wasted on the farm
through imposing uniformity. It's wasted in supermarket
shelves because of the long distance travel,
with a best before date. And I was so happy I had
to do a convocation in one of the Washington colleges. And the students cooked a
wonderful dinner for me. So I innocent
asked, I said, which organic farm
supplied the dinner? And they all had
grins on their face and they weren't telling me. I said, what's the secret? They said, it's all
a dumpster dived. [LAUGHTER] And they explained to me
about this new culture of preventing food waste
in doing dumpster diving. I really pay tribute
to the young people. They come up with such amazing
things to face these giants and to change the
insanity to sanity. Because all these
initiatives are growing, organic is growing,
local food is growing, seed saving is growing, there's
a new attempt at seed and food dictatorship. There's now an attempt to
criminalize seed saving. Already in Pennsylvania
and Maryland, notices have been served
to seed libraries. In the case of Pennsylvania,
a statement was made. Agroterrorism is a very,
very real scenario. And where does
agroterrorism come? From the ancient
seeds that we have grown for hundreds of years. Herited seeds and ancient
seeds pose a threat. GMOs are totally safe. They should be deregulated. The law basically is a
law imposing uniformity. Says, it shall be unlawful
to sell, offer for sale, expose for sale, which is
exchange between people, or transport any seed subject
to the provisions of this act. Any seed. They tried the same
last year in Europe. And we built a huge seed
freedom movement there with the European Parliament. There's a new French film made
by the French called Seed Wars, and they just sent me
the link for YouTube. I looked at it and it was
really nice to go back to last year and the
mobilizing we did. The law was sent back to
the European Commission. But there are 19 states
with such legislation to make biodiversity
and local seeds illegal. 19 states, and Arizona
is one of them. Now, a similar law was
introduced in India. Same year, 2004, when
your laws are changing, they've been kind of kept in
cold storage all these years, and they're being
brought out now. And the fact that they're
being brought out now is because the dictators are
panicking because of democracy. If all these seeds
are available, how will they collect
royalties from toxic GMO seeds? Sooner or later, that
market will shrink. So the only way to
make that market grow is shut down the rest. And in 2004 they tried
to do a similar law. And I can just see how 2004
they became very active. And I saw these two lines
in our financial papers. So I immediately got in
touch with parliamentarians, got a text of this seed act. These acts are called seed acts. And therefore compulsory
licensing and compulsory registration of any seed. I've studied it. I've traveled the country. When any occasion
like this happens, I just get out there
with communities and travel the country and
inform them and show them and translate into
different languages. And by the end of it, hundreds
of thousands of farmers had signed a petition telling
our prime minister, which I carried to him, that we
are in the land of Gandhi. And when the British
tried to impose salt laws, Gandhi walked to the
beach, picked up the salt from the sea, said
nature gives it for free. We need it for our survival. We will continue to make salt. We will not obey your laws. And we take inspiration
from the salt satyagraha. Satyagraha was Gandhi's
word for the force of truth. Satya Is truth,
agraha is the force. Truth, force. And he said, as long
as the illusion exists that unjust laws must be obeyed,
so long will slavery exist. And he worked on this
first in South Africa against the apartheid regime. 1930, he used it
against the salt laws. So I told our prime minister,
we are in the land of Gandhi. And if you impose
such a law, we will have to do a seed satyagraha. So it won't work anyway. Because we have higher
duties to higher laws. Laws of corporate monopoly
are degraded laws. Laws of protecting biodiversity
and providing good food to all through saving good
seed is the higher law both in terms of the laws
of the earth and the planet as well as laws of
justice and human rights and human dignity
and human freedom. We now have to decide our
role in the future of food. Will it be a role of engaging,
of building the alternatives that allow all life
on earth to prosper while bringing us big food? Or will it be a future where
we witness impassivity, this unfolding of a
deeper dictatorship? You know, the
other dictatorships were around speech. If I can't speak my
beliefs, I don't die. The difference between
this dictatorship over seed and food and
all earlier dictatorships is because this is touching on
the very basis of our survival. So we have to move beyond
reductionist mechanistic science that separates and
fragments and creates illusions that we are doing better
in our food system, even while we are losing
our ecological endowment, and while we are
losing our health and we're losing our freedom. We have to go beyond
reductionist economics, which defines people as labor
and then labor as an input and the earth as land
and land as an input into a system where mysteriously
value gets created somewhere else. I deeply believe
that human beings are a creative
force, not capital. Toxic chemicals are
not a creative force. They're a destructive force. Human beings as a creative
force are an outcome of a good agricultural system. And in a similar way,
rejuvenated biodiversity, rejuvenating soils,
rejuvenated water, a stable climate are outcomes
of an agriculture system. They are the objective. Taking care of the
earth is the objective. I always tell people who
come to our earth university where we run courses
on agroecology, we run courses
throughout the year. There's a biodiversity
farm, a research farm, a training farm in Doon Valley. I say our first work in
creating earth democracy and in creating food
democracy is earth care. We just have to take care of
the earth and the biodiversity in the soil. The rest biodiversity
does for us. She controls the pests. She rejuvenates the water. We only have to do
our duty to the earth. And I can tell
you in these years since we've started the work,
we don't have pests that damage. We have insects that
are doing all the work. Ladybirds and spiders
on every plant. Volunteer crops
that are food, that would be the source
of nutrition if they weren't sprayed with Roundup. And then they want to
do bio fortification by genetically engineering
rice and banana. Rice for vitamin A, banana
for vitamin A and iron. Biodiversity is thousands
of percent more efficient in getting us the
nutrition we need. These new reductionist
tricks, for a short while, will work only because there's
lots of advertising money. I've been told $400
million has been spent to kill labeling
laws in the last few years. And talking about
democracy and freedom, besides the fact that
there's this new attempt to shut down seed
libraries, there is of course the attempt
to prevent labeling. 64 countries of the world have
mandatory labeling of GMOs. This country doesn't only
me not have labeling, every time citizens organize
to get labeling, 40 million is put in, 30 million is put
in, California, Washington, right now Oregon is going on. Well, Vermont's too small
and it went through. They got their labeling law. And I am traveling from here
to Vermont for solidarity. [APPLAUSE] Not only do we have
a dictatorship, we have a dictatorship
of fictitious persons. [LAUGHTER] Vermont is being sued
for its labeling law because Monsanto and others
say that citizens knowing what they're eating and having the
freedom to choose what they eat is robbing the cooperation
of their freedom of speech. [LAUGHTER] I feel the challenge we
have for food democracy is to realize that democracy
is populated by real beings. Earth democracy is all
the beings of the earth. Food democracy, the
human beings involved in producing food
and eating food. And it's their freedom
that comes first. Not a fictitious person
[INAUDIBLE] corporations. That's a construct and it's
now becoming a construct that's threatening both
food and democracy. We have neither
bread nor freedom if this kind of false
freedom, of folds beings, is allowed to unfold. So we have all the evidence
that working with the earth, we produce more food. Working with the earth,
we produce better food. And this is scientific. It's scientific to work
with the laws of nature. It's unscientific to cook
up laws and impose them on nature and humanity. So the earth is inviting
us to create food democracy as a way of restoring
earth democracy. To decline her invitation
at this point of our species evolution would be to live in
a dictatorship for a short time and not live at all
in the long run. And that, I'm sure
you agree, would not be a very intelligent choice. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] So because we have such
a limited amount of time, we have asked all of the
people who reserved tickets for tonight to submit questions. And so I'm going to be
reading the questions that were submitted by those of
you who sent in questions. And I'm going to just read them
the way they were submitted. So in fact, you might have
already sort of answered some of these questions, but
this will give you a chance to elaborate a
little bit further. Some researchers are
saying that 80% of people will live in cities
by 2050 or 2080. Can you talk about how
your work answers questions about the looming
increases in urbanization of the world's population? First I don't treat
it as an inevitability that cities will
continue to grow. Cities are growing because of
a dysfunctional agriculture system that's making agriculture
livelihoods un-viable because of the way farmers
are being exploited. Farms don't earn anything
anymore because of all those subsidies that are used to
dump cheap products, especially in our parts of the world. But when farmers are
in a distressed system where there's only
one buyer, a Cargill is the only one you'll
sell your corn to. Cargill fixes the prices. And they always fix the prices
downwards, never upwards. And I've been told
this here corn and cotton are in such low
levels of price for farms, there's going to
be more distress. So we do need to correct the
agrarian system for fairness and sustainability. The fact that cities
have grown recently doesn't get rid of
that responsibility to correct our
agricultural system. As far as cities are concerned,
cities are dependent on food. Food is their metabolism. I was just reading a Mitsubishi
ad saying the same thing. There will be bigger
cities, more cities. And therefore, we are the
smart ones who'll deliver food. And we'll do it
through logistics and we'll do it
through GPS systems. No, you can do it
with local farmers. That's what the CSA's about. That's what urban
agriculture's about. [APPLAUSE] And if we just realize that
food is the metabolism even of cities, then you
first begin to grow in the city what you
can grow in the city. You can have CSAs
linking to the city. And then you have food sheds
linking on a larger level. A larger city will have
a larger food shed, but it'll still be
local to that city. And a smaller city will
have a smaller food shed. So cities don't mean
local doesn't work, organic doesn't work. It's just an illusion
of the mind to say, because there are cities,
let's trash the planet. There'll be no food
on a dead planet. What would you say or
recommend to students interested in food systems about
how they can make a career out of making our food systems more
sustainable and democratic? Well, the first is I really
do believe that being a farmer is the highest vocation
in today's world. [APPLAUSE] And it's as the young people,
as you students, get into it, you're going to change it. You're going to
change the terms. I was giving a talk
and the moderator just asked the students,
how many of you would be farmers if you could? The whole hall put up its hands. If you could. It's also necessary to
undo this deep inequality between the countryside
and the city. With the assumption that the
people in the countryside have no brains. All the brains are in cities. And of course that
thesis doesn't work. Because how could someone with
no brain when they migrate to the city suddenly
have brains? [LAUGHTER] I have a new book
coming out for the expo 2015 that's going
to be held in Milan. And I worked in that book
how it is so important to see agriculture as the
place where opportunities for employment and
livelihood grow. I meet young people who've
been at our farm in training, and I meet them in Brazil or
I meet them somewhere else. They've started organic cafes. Someone is an organic farmer,
someone else is a city dweller. They are creating partnerships
of the most amazing kind. So the food system is so rich. It's inviting you as produces. Its inviting you as researchers. It's inviting you
as entrepreneurs. But the most
important issue is, it is time to stop looking down
on those who give us food. It's time to put them
at the pedestal of being the custodians of the land. They're not producing
commodities. They're taking care of the
land and the biodiversity and the water and
even the atmosphere. Because when they
do organic farming, they are reversing
climate change. And when we realize
agriculture's about these multi-dimensional,
multi-functional activities, then the shift will
start to happen. And then you'll be the ones who
make sure that farmers aren't getting 2% of the consumer
dollar, but getting 50%. And that'll make anyone's
life possible in agriculture. [APPLAUSE] We have several of our
local farmers here today and CSA honors, and I
just want to give a nod to those people who
are here with us today. Yay. [APPLAUSE] Next question. Is there a way that
you think small scale farmers and conventional
agribusiness can coexist? Given our need to feed the
world, are there things that the small
scale sector could learn from agribusiness
and vice versa? [LAUGHTER] Well, I think I can
see farmers running classes for agribusiness. But frankly, what has
agribusiness brought us? They brought us toxic chemicals. And I think agriculture
and food systems are better off without them. And we now have
the data that shows that ecological agriculture
produces more food. Agribusiness has brought us
global distribution chains. Do we need more food coming
from far away or less? So this long distance globalized
supply chains is, again, not a relevant issue. I would be so happy to see
agribusiness realize that they depend on the land and the
biodiversity and the farmers to create relationships
of respect and then take permission from
the earth as well as farmers tell us what is our role. If they have a role,
farmers will decide. Very nice. What would you say
to our students who don't want to
be farmers or who don't want to go
back to the land? I'm just reading the questions. I absolutely don't think
everyone should be farmers and it shouldn't become a
new imposition of any kind. It should be an inspiration. If it matches your
passions, then we have to change the terms so that
it's fulfilling and satisfying and meaningful and
dignified for you. But you can't run away
from food no matter what. You can run away from farming. But you've got to eat. So all students just have
to become more concerned about where does their food
come from, how was it grown. They need to become active,
if not as farmers, as eaters. And that is both about the
sustainability of the planet and it's about the
sustainability of your health. I don't have to tell you
about the obesity epidemic of this country, which is
all related to bad food. We've created structures
which have imposed bad food and deprived people
of good food. Now, that health literacy
is vital for everyone. And that role in
spreading that literacy, you have a particularly
special responsibility because you've been to a
wonderful university which is the top on sustainability. How can we have non sustainable
health and a sustainable planet? Our health itself is
reaching limits of total non sustainability with
the disease epidemics. And that's another area
where constantly research is shut down and good
researchers are ridiculed. So you need to join
in that side of it. If you don't want to be
at the beginning of it, at least be at the end of it. Given that most everything
we and our ancestors have ingested over the years
has been genetically tweaked, what make the
contemporary methods used to alter genetic
makeup of a crop taboo? And why, at the end
of the day, when practically every crop
in existence was modified ages ago even make the
distinction between GMO and non GMO? OK, the word that's used for
genetically engineered seeds has become GMOs by default. It's become GMOs
because industry never wanted genetic engineering
to be the word communicated. And in fact, in the UN
treaty on convention on biological diversity,
they went further and said no, not even GMOs. Talk about it as
living modified. Now, there were two
reasons this was done. Each of you is a living modified
version of your parents. Offspring are never
clones of their parents. They're a little variation. Living modified, genetically
modified, and from it to GMOs. The difference
between what is called genetic tweaking and
genetic engineering is this. In nature, plants have
evolved in a dynamic way. Farmers have worked with plants
as breeders in co-evolution. All farmers breeding,
which accounts from 99.9% of all of
breeding, is a core evolution with nature. Working with the
evolutionary patterns of the plant and the seed. Even cross breeding
works within those laws. And cross breeding is
within the same species, as this hybrid seeds. They are all within
the same species. The distinctiveness
of all breeding and genetic engineering
is genetic engineering allows you using the tools
of recombinant DNA research to introduce genes
into a plant that don't belong to that plant. And because it's an
[INAUDIBLE] technology, you don't just
introduce new genes of BT toxins or
herbicide tolerance. You add antibiotic
resistance markers just for marking and separating
the failed introduction from those that were
successful and viral promoters. No plant has ever had genes
from unrelated species through evolution's history
or through plant breeding. And that's what
we are calling on for testing and
research and safety. Pigs with human growth hormones. In England, the
ladybird beetle controls aphids beautifully
in wheat plants. They've killed the
beetles and now they want to genetically engineer
the wheat with a cow like gene. And when I asked my
colleagues in England, asked what this
cow like gene is, they said we can't tell you. Trade secret. So we don't know what
the cow like gene is. A wheat has never had
cow like genes before. A cabbage has never had
scorpion genes before. There was a Dr. Bishop
doing this work. Corn has never
had BT toxin genes in it before being expressed
in every cell all the time, impacting the butterflies. Monarch butterflies died
when they were fed BT pollen. We've done studies
on soil organisms, 22% gone in four
years of planting. So it's not the same. There is a distinction. That is why
substantial equivalents or the argument
that we've always tweaked genes or nature
has always tweaked genes and therefore we can mess up
the genetic code of plants in our food systems is
unscientific to begin with and irresponsible
to everyone. Thank you. That's, I think, a really
wonderful ending of the lecture And so yes, let's
give her a hand. [APPLAUSE] This presentation
is brought to you by Arizona State University's
Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. For educational and
non-commercial use only.
